A State of the Blog Thing

A lot's changed since the last time I wrote in here.

For one thing that game I was talking about never happened. Stuff kept coming up for everyone involved so it just kept getting postponed until finally I just accepted that we weren't going to play.

So I began retooling it as a free-for-all hexcrawl kind of thing. I was going to pull from the West Marches games and other internet famous hexcrawl and mega dungeon games. The plan was to get it to a playable state and then run it using the new Dungeon Fantasy RPG recently released by Steve Jackson games at my FLGS. It's powered by GURPS and I think it would've been a nice change from the D&D and Pathfinder games that were getting run there. Unfortunately the company that owns the building they operated out of decided to jack their rent up which, when combined with a slow holiday season last year, means that they had to close their doors at the beginning of this past September. RIP The Enchanted Badger, the best damn gaming store that this town's seen in the years that I've been part of the gaming community.

Now I'm back to writing it up to play with a smaller and more consistent pool of players, hopefully with some guest players periodically. I'm back to planning it out in GURPS as well since I'm currently playing in a D&D 5e game run by one of the other members of my group. It's her first time DMing a game (or maybe her second?) and the first time most of us have actually played 5e so things can be...rough sometimes but it's fun. I kinda wish there was a bit more RP at times but to be fair we're all pretty rusty and this is a fairly straight forward dungeon crawl so whatever.

I'm going to try and properly resurrect this blog as well. Right now the plan is to do play reports for the game I'm playing in that'll post every other Monday, since we play every other Saturday. On Wednesdays or Thursdays I'm going to do some game design stuff, mostly geared towards the fantasy game I'm planning on running, though it might be for other games too since I've got system ADD pretty bad and I'm hoping that this'll be a good way to help curb it so I can stay focused.

So that's the plan, hopefully I can maintain output consistently enough that I'll feel comfortable enough to push myself to expand the audience for this thing. Maybe even submit it to the GURPSday Thursday thing that Douglas H Cole does on Gaming Ballistic.

Choosing a Game System and You, or More Accurately, My One Sided Conversation with Myself to Try and Figure Out What to Run

Like I mentioned last time I will hopefully be running a game gain sometime in the near future, and that while I'd like run GURPS running something we all know the basics of pretty well might be a better idea. This leaves either World of Darkness or some variation on D&D as games either everyone already basically knows or I know well enough that I can teach them without breaking a sweat. I settled on some variation of D&D, mostly because I could then perhaps get my players to do a switch over to GURPS at a later date with the same characters but rebuilt for the different system.

The next step was the figure out which variant of D&D to use. The game has spawned countless revisions, hacks, clones, and imitators and I own more then a few, not to mention all the ones available online for free or right next to it. After talking to a couple of the potential players (one of them a gaming gear head like me) I decided against going for d20/3rd/Pathfinder for this. There's just too much material out there for it and despite being able to run the game from heart after it being the go-to system for almost a decade of my gaming I decided that something a little more self contained was the order of the day. I also decided I wanted to run something I owned a dead tree edition of since generally I dislike electronics at the gaming table if it can be avoided so something I can only get as a pdf where the legality of printing the dang thing out is iffy tends to get sidelined in my mind. So now I get to pick between the newest edition of D&D (which I'm pretty sure is officially 5th edition but honestly I'm not sure since the ocean adjacent magi had talked about getting rid of edition numbering for...reasons) and the estimable Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (here after known as ACKS) from Autarch.

When I'd originally thought about this I was leaning heavily to ACKS since I really like the system and it's low level lethality, and the fact that most of the classes (especially the racial ones) map up nicely to the kinds of things that exist in my homebrew world Myganos. However after going over both I think I'm leaning more towards using 5e. Sure the racial classes don't exist and I might have a minor rebellion on my hands when I say there are race/class restrictions but honestly stuff I was afraid of (mostly starting power level and equipment) doesn't seem to be as big a deal as I'd feared. Especially with the wealth of homebrew material out there, not to mention the Unearthed Arcana articles, it seems like I'll be able to tweak the game to suit my desires. It might not be the "core"
game I was thinking of when I headed down this path, or even when I started writing this blog post) but the fact that the books are being sold in out FLGS and I think at least one of the potential players already owns at least the PHB, 5e might be the way to go.

So there we go, assuming this game gets off the ground I'll be running 5th edition Dungeon & Dragons in my homebrew setting of Myganos. Next up is gathering resources to tweak the system as needed, and trying to keep my desire to tinker to a minimum. Also writing a bit of fluff for the races and classes to give the players ideas about how they fit in and function in the world.

And we're back?

Since it looks like I might be running a game again sometime in the near future I'm going to try and restart this blog as a public place to noodle on my world building, game designs and planning, and possibly start reviewing products I've got? We'll see about that last one, if it happens it'll be ridiculously infrequent or possibly just me babbling about mostly out of print games that I've collected over the years. I'll probably start posting about my LARPing as well since that looks like my wife and I are going to start that up again and this seems like as good a place as any to talk about it.

I know I failed hard at the "D&D Thirty Day Challenge". January was a rough patch that I won't go in to unless someone asks but suffice to say real life ate me and has only recently released me enough for me to have the extra mental and emotional bandwidth to even think I might be able to keep this up. I did end up with a new-to-me car out of the ordeal which is nice, and I'll probably start the Challenge again but I'm not sure when. Anyway, back to business-

Like I was saying, one of the couples is moving into a bigger place with a guy from the FLGS and they'll have a spare room so we will hopefully (fingers crossed) be starting up a new game again! *cue the triumphant music*

First some logistics to help me organize things in my head. The current plan is the do a month or two of weekly gaming on Saturday nights or possibly Friday nights. After that we're going to switch to aiming for two games a month since we've proven time and again that we can't keep a weekly game together for very long. Ideally this'll happen once a fortnight but there will be some flexibility built in so when the inevitable conflicts arise we'll be able to shift things and hopefully still get two games in that month.

That leaves what we're going to be playing. I honestly would like to just jump into a GURPS game because that's a system I've wanted to run for literal years and have never managed to get father than getting everyone's characters made. One of my potential players brought up the fact that none of us have gamed in the last year so it'd probably make more sense to run something we all know relatively well already though, ie some flavor of D&D or something World of Darkness. After some thought I think I'm going to go with D&D because I've been wanting to do some fairly straight forward fantasy gaming and my World of Darkness stuff always ends up being a slightly surrealistic horror show with ghosts, demons, Mythos inspired insanity, dream-prophecy, and kinda oddly placed bits of mundanity for the "simple to get us back in the swing of things" game we were talking about. [Also if I play my cards right I can "encourage" a conversion to GURPS at a later point....]

Tune in next time for me arguing with myself about if I should run Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition or Adventurer, Conqueror, King System; the pros and cons of both for what I want to do with the game, and the thrilling conclusion of my perhaps too open display of my particular brand of insanity!

Quickly, Before I Pass Out

Quick post before I pass out since it's almost 3am, I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night and I've been up since 7am or so. Basically this is just an update to declare my intentions of returning to this and hopefully make a better go of it. It's also going to be very stream of consciousness so it might not make a whole lot of coherent sense.

One of my players (temporarily my GM) is running an IKRPG game for the group. When we started out we had a large Protectorate of Menoth paladin, a dwarven arcane mechanic and his "pet" Warjack, and an inquisitive sharpshooter from a merc company full of pirates. Because I thought of something a bit more in-line with the game premise I switched from my pseudo-Arabic paladin to a commando working for Cygnar's intelligence organization. The guy playing the dwarf switch to an ogrun (think civilized orc/ogre that hails from dwarven lands) because I jokingly told him his character had heroically sacrificed himself in battle to save the lives of myself and the other PC. He thought I was serious and erased his character sheet and started making his ogrun ironhead.

Of course now that we're starting to get in the swing of things the guy running the game switched positions at the school we work at and he's now working weekends. Hopefully this won't interfere with game too much. As it stands though game's on indefinite hiatus until he gets used to his new schedule and figures out if and when he's going to be working past five on Saturdays since that's our optimal start time.

On the plus side a friend of ours messaged me saying he had more free time so he could start gaming again. This unfortunately is because him and his wife are splitting up however so I'm very conflicted about how happy to be about this news. I really need to actually take the time to grab lunch with him at some point.

I'm now planning on using this blog (I know, I've said that before) to help me plan out games I want to run. When and if I ever get to run them who knows but at least I'll have something down in case. So, really quick without any real explanation:

• RuneQuest 6 translation of 2nd edition era Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with some influences pulled from 1st WFRP and early editions of the wargame
• GURPS Fantasy hexcrawl set in my own home brew setting
• further defining my "Ithaca by Night" setting thing for new World of Darkness (That's Ithaca New York not Ithaca Greece. Sorry all you Grecophiles out there. Also does anyone call it the "new" World of Darkness anymore except people that played in "old/classic" World of Darkness?)
• translate Forgotten Realms to ACKS, with most of the work going into custom divine casters and other classes though defining either the Sea of Fallen Stars or The Sword Coast with the economic rules in ACKS sounds interesting.
• Mapping out a few sectors for Mongoose Traveller.
• Further defining the collaborative map my gaming group made for a Burning Wheel game a few years back.

There I think that's all of it. I'm supposed to be planning something for some out of town friends for when they're here at some point. Only problem is I don't know when "at some point" is so it's hard to build up the drive to start planning. I'm thinking I might print off the D&D 5e starter rules and run the two people left in my group through something basic though to fill up time while our GM settles into his schedule.